Like other people, I’ve been wondering how Oracle has integrated many of Sun’s technologies and hardware after buying that company. Oracle has just started a nationwide tour to inform us of just that. The first stop was in their neck of the woods, Palo Alto, California. The free seminar information, titled “Share the Vision: Build a More Efficient and Powerful Datacenter with Oracle,” is found here, along with the agenda and locations.

Now that Oracle has Sun’s hardware, Solaris operating system, virtualization engine, and other components, they can provide well-integrated solutions for data centers, as this slide shows:

The plan is to increase server and storage performance by several times and even tens of times more in a few years.

Server Performance Increase

Storage Performance Increase

In addition to Solaris, they have Red Hat–compatible Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) and support. Their virtualization is implemented through Oracle’s version of Xen software, Oracle VM. On top of Xen, Oracle added management and other software to make it a comprehensive offering for virtualization. The features of Virtual Iron, which Oracle acquired some time ago, are being integrated into Oracle VM. Both Oracle VM and Virtual Iron are based on Xen, so the integration should not be too hard.

A presentation on cloud computing was a good tutorial. Many of Oracle’s customers are enterprises, which tend to use VMware’s virtualization solution. Oracle provides a feature to translate VMware VM file formats to theirs. Currently, private or on-premise clouds are implemented mostly with VMware, and public clouds (AWS and Rackspace) are implemented with Xen. Eucalyptus’s enterprise version has a feature that is the reverse of what Oracle VM does. It can translate VMs by VMware on-premise to AWS file formats to allow them to be transported to AWS public cloud (known as CloudBurst).

Oracle view on Enterprise Evolution to Cloud

Since Oracle now owns microprocessors, server and storage hardware, operating systems, virtualization engines, databases, and applications, they can fine-tune the entire system to make it very efficient and execute very fast. Although Oracle is still small compared with IBM in terms of revenue (Oracle $27B vs. IBM $96B), Oracle is now in a position to compete with IBM.

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		Energy Efficient Cooling for Data Centers: A Close-Coupled Row Solution
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The seminar was well run and presented very useful information. If there was one thing I did not like about it, it was the lack of discussion of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency and green IT initiatives were mentioned several times during the day, but they were not discussed in detail. I asked one of the speakers to share some energy efficiency data with me. If and when I get it, I will publish it here.

Tags: Data Center, Data Center Efficiency